THE VISIONARY OF BROHOBYCZ

Published: October 30, 1988

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The image is thrillingly visceral. Schulz in his fiction everywhere strives to physicalize sensation, rendering atmospheres into ''plasmas,'' showing skies to be weighty accumulations, thickening and slowing the passage of appearances so that the reader becomes sleepy with the heavy verbal richness. It is as in his ''Autumn,'' published here for the first time in English: ''The vast cavernous beds, piled high with chilly layers of sheets and blankets, waited for our bodies. The night's floodgates groaned under the rising pressure of dark masses of slumber, a dense lava that was just about to erupt and pour over its dams, over the doors, the old wardrobes, the stoves where the wind sighed.'' Images crowd toward virtual gridlock, a frozen carnival of gnarled accuracies: ''Autumn looks for herself in the sap and primitive vigor of the Durers and Breughels. That form bursts from the overflow of material, hardens into whorls and knots, seizes matter in its jaws and talons, squeezes, ravishes, deforms, and dismisses it from its clutches imprinted with the marks of this struggle as half-formed hunks, with the brand of uncanny life stamped in the grimaces extruded from their wooden faces.'' The translators, Walter Arndt and Victoria Nelson, here and elsewhere admirably cope with the luxuriantly loaded language.

Schulz's drawings - over 50 are reproduced here, at a generally dinky size in a busy, choppy format full of photographs and border lines - have relatively little of this passionate reification. They accept conventions of doll-like stylization in depicting women, and most of the men look like Schulz in his photographs - twisted and foreshortened as if by some unconscious evasive maneuver. Though skillful and earnest in their fashion, the drawings seem wooden and constrained, falling short of the pornography implicit in their ambiance of deshabille, whips, and greasy hatching.

Juliusz Flaszen, an acquaintance, recalled of Schulz in the late 1920's: ''He was morbidly shy; I was right, I think, in setting him down as suffering from an inferiority complex. One day he brought along his paintings and drawings and asked for my opinion. The great part of this work consisted of pen and pencil sketches which in their thematics and technique recalled [ Felicien ] Rops. The chief motif was male sexual enslavement to the beautiful contours of the female body.'' One etching, from a cycle titled ''A Book of Idolatry,'' shows a naked woman, attended by a winged minion and elevated upon a fanciful couch, pressing her bare foot down into the face of a male adorer in suit and shoes. Others show men crawling and crouching on the floor, and half-transformed into beasts. Schulz's work was admired, and his exhibits nearly always sold out - ''at wretched prices,'' Flaszen added. ''His self-esteem was so low that he always feared to overcharge.''

Schulz's graphic skills continued to serve him in darker times. After Drohobycz was occupied by the Soviet Union in 1939, local authorities commissioned from Schulz, according to an editorial note, ''portraits of Stalin and scenes symbolizing the joys of annexation, painted in the obligatory manner of Socialist Realism.'' And in one version of his death, witnessed only by Izydor Friedman, ''he was shot in the street by a Gestapo officer who had a grudge against another Nazi, Schulz's temporary 'protector' who liked his paintings.''

The horrors of German rule over Poland permeate this book of remnants; its scraps of salvaged correspondence smell of slaughter and incineration. Vast numbers of his letters perished in the Holocaust, as did most of his correspondents. Before the war, Schulz in his loneliness was a dedicated letter-writer. In 1936 he wrote to Romana Halpern: ''It is a pity we didn't know each other a few years ago; I was still able to write beautiful letters then. It was out of my letters that 'Cinnamon Shops' gradually grew. Most of these letters were addressed to Debora Vogel.'' All of Schulz's letters to Vogel, an avant-garde poet and novelist, have vanished, as have his letters to another early encourager, Wladyslaw Riff, and to his fiancee, Jozefina Szelinska, and to ''muses'' (as Schulz called them) like Maria Chazen and Zofia Nalkowska, and to Thomas Mann, whom Schulz admired next only to Rilke and to whom he confided the manuscript of his one German-language tale, ''Die Heimkehr.'' ''Die Heimkehr'' has vanished, as has ''The Messiah'' and all the trove of ''papers, notes, and correspondence'' that Schulz told Izydor Friedman he had deposited ''with a Catholic outside the ghetto.'' Friedman, one of the few witnesses to Schulz's life to survive the war, claimed, ''Unfortunately he did not give me the person's name, or possibly I forgot it.'' No advertisement or search has discovered the person, or the cache.

Only four letters survive of those written before the publication of Schulz's first book in 1934. The surge of epistolary energy that helped create this book ebbed afterwards, though there are still flashes of poetic extravagance, of Schulz's visionary materialization of feelings. To Tadeusz Breza he wrote in 1934, ''People's weakness delivers their souls to us, makes them needy. That loss of an electron ionizes them and renders them suitable for chemical bonding,'' and, later in the year, ''For you must realize that my nerves have been stretched thin like a net over the entire handicraft center, have crept along the floor, smothered the walls like tapestry and covered the shops and the smithy with a dense web.''